Off Keck Road by Mona Simpson Read Free Book Online Page A

wasn’t the roses, Bea understood, or music. Even though she’d grown up in De Pere and attended the same schools and the same church, Marge Garsh’s father was the undertaker. She was a perfectly decent choice for Bill Alberts—she’d been a moderately popular girl, a candy striper in the hospital and then a cheerleader—even though she was so much younger. It was not as if he’d married someone Polish.
    Still, Marge Garsh was not immune to criticism from these women, as their own daughters were, as Bea knew herself to be. When Celia Howard, a daughter of the family who owned
The Press Gazette
and one of the paper mills, lost Kip Dannenford’s grandmother’s pink diamond swimming in Fish Creek, Bea’s mother and all her friends just laughed.

VII
    O ne afternoon in 1970, Bea rushed into the office after a showing, before a five o’clock tee time, to write up the multiple offers that were due to come in over the next hour, when her boss summoned her to his big office.
    She sat where she had the day he hired her, on the other side of his immense desk.
    He looked at her in his intent way, his fingertips barely touching. “So are you still liking it here?” he asked.
    â€œOh, sure.”
    â€œGood,” he said, musing on something. “Good.” Piano music was playing in the background, but like no piano music Bea had ever heard. It was “Für Elise” spilled in a mess all over the air.
    â€œEarning enough?”
    â€œWell . . . ” She laughed, feeling a certain discomfort in her wool suit. The breeze from the open window was watery, warm. He knew as well as she did that she’d sold seventeen houses since the first of the year, and as likely as not, he also knew the contents of her trust account at the bank.
    â€œOf course, your sales record is excellent. If you need a larger monthly floor, expenses, whatever . . . ” He waved his hands. “You know, I always tell Marge, if I were ever to leave her for someone, it would be Bea Maxwell.”
    â€œWhat is this?” she said.
    He stood up and started to dance! “Joe Mooney, the world’s only hip organ/accordian player,” he said.
    â€œWe took our honeymoon in Miami because he had a regular gig at a steak house there and never played Chicago. This is ‘I Wonder What Became of Me?’ written in 1946 by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen for their Broadway flop,
St. Louis Woman
.”
    She thought it was wonderful he could remember all that. His door was open. She looked instantly, her head snapping, but Edith, his tireless secretary, was not at her desk. It was a spring Tuesday, almost evening. Edith sang in the Episcopal church choir and Tuesday was practice night.
    Every day, she wrote another saying on her blackboard. Today, Tuesday, April 21, 1970, it was:
Smile. It takes 72 muscles to frown, only 14 to smile
.
    Dogwood branches ticked against the Federal windows, the sky outside banded with orange and peach. “They pour champagne just like it was rain,” the lyrics went. “It’s a sight to see, but I wonder what’s become of me.”
    People said the paper mill’s pollution was what made their sunsets so beautiful over the Fox River. Sometimes they could smell the sulfur, but not tonight. She could see the piles of black coal and yellow sulfur, two stories high.
    He danced her around a bit. “He was blind, very angular. A blind man without sunglasses. Very delicate organist. He played a nightclub in New York in ’63, ’64. The Most, the place was called. He had his Cocktail Combo. Should have gone. Now he’s in Miami again, working local clubs and playing organ in church every Sunday morning.”
    That old elusive happiness
. Bea made some sort of motion with her arm, standing up as if she were brushing crumbs from her suit. She walked to her office then, briskly, where the phone would ring soon, and he followed her. She